Leaders Who Say ‘My Door Is Always Open’ Often Have The Least Honest Feedback In The Building.

“My Door Is Always Open.”

It’s one of the most repeated phrases in Kenyan workplaces.

It’s also, very often, one of the most dishonest.

Not because the leader is lying. But because they genuinely believe it. They’ve said it so many times they’ve mistaken the invitation for the outcome. They think that because they are approachable, people are approaching them. They think because they’ve created an open-door policy, honest feedback is flowing freely through it.

It isn’t.

I’ve sat across from enough CEOs, MDs, and senior leaders to recognise a pattern that nobody in the room ever says out loud.

The higher you rise, the less truth you receive.

Not because your team doesn’t see the problems. They see them clearly, sometimes before you do. The missed targets. The toxic team lead you keep defending. The strategy that made sense on paper but is falling apart in execution. The culture that looks fine in town halls but is quietly bleeding talent.

They see it. They talk about it with each other, in WhatsApp groups, over lunch, in parking lots after long meetings.

Just not with you.

And if you’re a leader who believes your team is comfortable telling you hard truths, ask yourself this, when last did someone walk through that open door and tell you something that genuinely surprised you? When last did a team member push back on your idea in a meeting, not just nod along and raise concerns privately afterward?

If you’re struggling to remember, that’s your answer.

Here is why the open door doesn’t work the way you think it does.

Psychological safety is not created by availability. It is created by track record.

Your team is not watching whether your door is open. They are watching what happens when someone walks through it with bad news. They are watching whether the messenger gets shot. They are watching whether you actually act on feedback or smile, thank them, and proceed exactly as planned. They are watching whether the people who challenge you get quietly sidelined while the ones who agree with everything keep getting promoted.

They have been watching for a long time. And they have drawn conclusions you don’t know about.

The most dangerous leader in any organization is not the one who is aggressive or unapproachable.

It’s the one who is warm, likeable, and completely insulated from reality, surrounded by people who have learned that agreeing is safe and honesty is risky.

These leaders make decisions based on incomplete information and call it strategy. They’re blindsided by resignations they never saw coming. They lose their best people to competitors and genuinely don’t understand why. They run engagement surveys, get average scores, and wonder what’s missing, never realizing the survey itself was answered with the same careful dishonesty as every other interaction.

This is not a small problem. In my experience placing talent and working with organizations across Kenya, culture rot almost always starts here, at the top, in the silence that polite leadership accidentally creates.

So what does honest feedback actually require?

It requires you to stop waiting for people to come to you and start going to them, on their terms, in their spaces, with genuine curiosity and without your title filling the room.

It requires you to reward the person who delivers uncomfortable news, visibly and publicly, so the rest of the team learns that truth is safe here.

It requires you to act on what you hear even partially so that feedback doesn’t feel like a performance exercise.

And it requires a level of personal humility that is genuinely rare at senior levels. The humility to accept that your perception of your leadership and your team’s experience of it may be two completely different realities.

The open door is a good start. But it was never enough.

If you want the truth, you have to make truth-telling safer than silence.

Because right now, in most organizations, silence is winning.